Good Sam campground guide

4X4Dodger wrote:

SDcampowneroperator wrote:
Hello All,
The 40 inspection teams who visit and rate every private park listed in the guide are contractors, without agenda influenced by rating or advertising.
They inspect and rate first, not review , then discuss listing with the camp. Their rating cannot be influenced by the listing or advertising. In my experience, they are above reproach.
The travel guide lists public camps at no cost, free,

with their provided information as a public service and that is what you pay for when purchasing the guide.
Max

While I am willing to agree that MOST of the contractor raters are honest folks just making a living and doing the best they can I find it incredibly naive to describe them as "above reproach" and "without agenda". Not even the Pope is above reproach and everyone has an agenda hidden or otherwise.

Are you really willing to contend that no rater has accepted gifts, free stays or other considerations for their reviews?

As, apparently from your name, you are an RV Park owner I find it astonishing that you don't seem to recognize that making the guide better, easier to use and more fair to all parks by correcting the rating flaws is in YOUR BEST INTEREST. Further if you are Paying for this listing in the guide it would make even more sense to make sure the book is as good as it can be...and it is surely not at this point.

Your almost blind defense of everything GSE puzzles me especially when you can read the comments of people who are your customer base telling you there are problems....???

I am still curious as to what the great flaw is in the guidebook, and what is the solution. You make the point yourself that it is impossible to have a reviewer that is completely free of any bias. People complain that it is big and awkward, yet apparently you want even more stuff in it. It rates the private parks and lists many local, state and federal parks. Obviously, parks will fall through the cracks, and some can and do refuse to be listed at all.
If you have multiple reviewing criteria, that would make the guide even more confusing. It would be very easy to devise a guidebook the rated a service or industry that should be identical wherever you go. Rating McDonalds wouldn't be hard and it would be pretty easy to come up with a rating structure. RV parks, state parks, national parks, forest service campgrounds, Corp or Engineer parks and the like not so easy. They are different by design. A park in Toledo Ohio is going to be very different from a park next to the Grand Canyon. A forest service park in the Sequoia National forest would need to be scored differently than a BLM park in the Senora Desert.
Some of the complaints about the book are legit, but often still lack an easy solution. The way the parks' locations are listing is an example already discussed in this thread. a true issue, but no easy repair.
Too many people forget Good Sam is a for profit entity. They are going to spend their money, effort and time on reviewing, rating and yes, selling advertising, to private parks. There is no upside to them spending thousands of additional man-hours collecting more data on publicly owned parks. That information would not allow them to materially raise the price of the book. It wouldn't sell them more advertising. And it might very well cause some advertisers to re-direct their advertising dollars away from Good Sam. I know I wouldn't want my listing and ad to be buried in a sea of reviews and listings for the public parks in my areas. I have already decreased my advertising in the guidebook because I feel print advertising is a dying quail and I have redirected those funds to internet and mobile platforms. I assume Good Sam also has a handle on the changing world of advertising and has already made the decision that putting more resources into any paper product is not a good business decision.